Teams With MarketCulture Strategies to Audit and Assess Organizational Sensitivity and Responsiveness to Customers, Competitors and Business Conditions

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - January 6, 2010) - The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council
today announced the formation of the Market Sense-Ability Center™ to
provide new advocacy, thought leadership, benchmarking services and best
practices on how to advance market-centric thinking as an integral part of
a company's organizational DNA.

The Council recommends that CMOs team with their CEO and executive team
members to create corporate cultures where every employee and partner
across the extended enterprise is sensitized and attentive to customer,
competitor and market conditions and dynamics. This level of insight and
agility is essential to driving business performance and competitive
advantage, notes the CMO Council.

"Global businesses are challenged to dramatically raise their capacity to
understand, predict and respond to both current and future customer, market
and competitor dynamics, demands and disruptions in an era of unprecedented
change and complexity," states Donovan Neale-May, the executive director of
the CMO Council. "Yet many companies have not adequately developed the
systems, practices and cultures needed to become Ever-Alert Enterprises
with sufficient Market Sense-Ability to keep pace."

According to CMO Council research, only 10.7 percent of companies have
deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer
feedback. While 75 percent say they receive customer feedback via e-mail,
only 23 percent say they track and measure the volume and nature of these
messages.

The CMO Council advocates that CMOs take a leadership role in benchmarking
and transforming the levels of market and customer centricity and
responsiveness throughout their organizations. The Market Sense-Ability
Center, housed on the CMO Council website, is designed to provide content
and tools to help marketers improve competitiveness and performance by
upgrading cultural alertness and response.

Included in the new Center is a self-audit made exclusively available for
free for CMOs to rate their level of Market Sense-Ability and
responsiveness to current and future customer needs, market dynamics and
competitive change. The Market Responsiveness Index (MRI)™ measures
culture based on a variety of organizational behaviors and allows CMOs to
compare their ratings with CMOs of other companies.

Developed by MarketCulture Strategies, the MRI™ has been proven, when used
as an organization-wide benchmarking instrument, to be a strong predictor
of business performance and customer value creation, and is an invaluable
platform for the planning of change activities. An organization-wide MRI
diagnosis from MarketCulture Strategies is being offered to CMO Council
members at a special discount.

The Center also includes a new white paper by Donovan Neale-May on the need
for CMOs to take a leadership role in building Ever-Alert Enterprises, as
well as other relevant articles and content. The white paper is titled
"Creating Market-Sensing Corporate Cultures Is an Essential CEO-CMO Joint
Initiative."

"Today's Chief Marketing Officer needs to be a valued change agent," states
Neale-May. "More than 50 percent are hired to fix broken marketing
organizations and lead transformation across all functional areas. This
includes measurably impacting and influencing company culture, customer
experience, competitive differentiation, brand recognition, sales
effectiveness and business performance," he added.

About the CMO Council

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level
knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building
among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a
wide-range of global industries. The CMO Council's 5,000 members control
more than $125 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run
complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total,
the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities include over 12,000
global executives across 100 countries in multiple industries, segments and
markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas,
Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The Council's strategic
interest groups include the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales
Effectiveness (CLOSE), Marketing Supply Chain Institute, Customer
Experience Board, LoyaltyLeaders.org, Online Marketing Performance
Institute, and the Forum to Advance the Mobile Experience (FAME).
www.cmocouncil.org

About Market Culture Strategies

MarketCulture Strategies works with corporations around the world to
improve competitiveness through the adoption of market-centric values,
practices and skills. The company offers benchmarking, strategic planning,
skills assessment and training, and transformation services that result in
more dynamic businesses and measurable improvements in sales growth,
profitability and customer satisfaction. Its Market Responsiveness Index
benchmarks an organization's capacity to respond to current and future
customer needs, competitive threats and external factors. MarketCulture
Strategies then works closely with corporate leaders to develop a
meaningful roadmap for developing Cultural Sense-Ability. Our research
shows that a 10 percent improvement in an MRI score delivers a 4 percent
improvement in profitability.